Race in America: Making sense of ‘Skip’ Gates’ arrest

“This was a power struggle that didn’t have to happen,” said Sandy Banks in the Los Angeles Times. When Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, a black Harvard professor, was recently arrested in his own home by a white police officer investigating reports of a burglary, most African-Americans saw it as a clear-cut case of unfair “racial profiling.” The president himself said the police had “acted stupidly” and referred to the “long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law-enforcement disproportionately.” But the next day Obama backed away from those remarks, as it became clear that the case was “not as simple as black suspect, white cop.” Sgt. James Crowley, it turns out, is widely respected by fellow cops and supervisors and was chosen to teach a course in racial sensitivity at the police academy. When he found Gates inside the home, and asked for identification, the livid 58-year-old professor lost his cool and let loose “with the kind of ‘yo’ momma’ insults we used to trade on the playground.” Crowley warned him to stop and to step outside, and then lost his cool, too, slapped the cuffs on Gates, and had him hauled off to the station house. Obama has since invited both men for a conciliatory beer at the White House, but the question remains: Why, exactly, was Gates arrested?

Simple—for being an arrogant jerk, said William Tucker in The American Spectator. Gates could have treated this for what it was—“an obvious misunderstanding,” and shown Crowley identification establishing that it was his house. “Instead, he decided to treat the whole thing as an intolerable insult,” called Crowley a racist, and chose to play the VIP card, yelling: “Do you know who you’re dealing with?” Race may have been a factor, said Heather Mac Donald in National Review Online, but only to the extent that Gates clearly suffers from “racial paranoia” and treated Crowley like some redneck oppressor. When anyone—white or black—treats cops with evident “contempt,” there’s a good chance they’ll wind up in handcuffs.

Nice try, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. Yes, it may have been Gates’ air of “highhanded superiority,” rather than his skin color, that most irritated the working-class police sergeant. But does anyone seriously think that a white, equally arrogant Harvard professor would have been thrown in jail for mouthing off? Something tells me not. Besides, said Vincent Carroll in The Denver Post, hurting a cop’s feelings is not a crime in this country. There’s no excuse for the police arresting a 5-foot-8, 150-pound professor who walks with a cane, regardless of what he said or what race he might be.

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Sadly, though, race is always a factor, said Judith Warner in The New York Times. Crowley, by all accounts, is as far from the cliché of the racist white cop as one could imagine. (It was he, in 1993, who vainly applied CPR to dying Boston Celtics player Reggie Lewis.) Gates, meanwhile, is known as one of the most thoughtful and least provocative of the big-name black-studies intellectuals. Yet in those fateful few minutes in Gates’ kitchen and on his porch, it seems clear that both men’s “thoughts were traveling well-worn grooves chiseled by race.” Had Gates been white, Crowley’s request for ID would not have “sounded like an insult,” or stirred up memories of innocent black men beaten or shot by cops. Crowley later said that when he was confronted by the angry possible intruder inside the house, he had to wonder for a moment if he’d make it home safely that evening to his wife and children. Clearly, said Derrick Jackson in The Boston Globe, the Gates case is “a serious cautionary tale that we are not in ‘post-racial’ America” just yet.

Obama proved that himself, when he was asked about his friend Gates’ arrest, said David Paul Kuhn in RealClearPolitics.com. For once, Obama reacted not like “a president who happens to be black” but “as a president who is also a black man.” His presence in the Oval Office may not mean we’ve transcended race, but it does open an opportunity to look at the racial divide honestly, and to think hard about why both Gates and Crowley reacted the way they did. What we don’t need are any phony apologies from either side, said the Chicago Sun-Times in an editorial. A shared beer, and a frank conversation, “might be a better idea.”